As Seen in Vanity Fair's August 2006 Issue!
As Seen in US News & World Report's September 11 Fifth Anniversary Issue!
As Seen in Time Magazine's September 11, 2006 Issue!
As Seen in Phoenix New Times' August 9, 2007 Issue!

Saturday, October 21, 2006

The Paranoid Left Meets the Paranoid Right

This is hilarious. John Stadtmiller is the head honcho at Republic Broadcasting Network, which features such distinguished talk show hosts as Alex Jones, Jason Bermas and (formerly) Jim Fetzer.

Fetzer guested on Stadtmiller's show National Intel Report earlier this week. A caller dialed in and apparently started ragging on Bill and Hillary Clinton--they're Marxists and had people killed and by the way, Hillary's a lesbian. Fetzer is famously liberal and got angry at the caller, insisting that ideas like national healthcare were necessary and good for America, and that the other charges were ridiculous.

But Stadtmiller is a paranoid right-winger, and the talk of this on his own show let alone the RBN Network was absolutely anathema to him. So he apparently had a shouting match with Fetzer after the show was over, which, after an exchange of F-bombs resulted in Fetzer's own show being cancelled. You can listen to Stadmiller's summary of the episode (mp3 file) here.

It reveals something I find interesting about the 9-11 Denial. It combines such oddly diverse groups of people that seemingly have little else in common, and that seem fated to fracture because of their differences.

Fetzer represents the paranoid left, which had its heyday in the late 1960s and early 1970s, but pretty much had disappeared from American life. As to why they disappeared, the answer is that they pretty much moved into the liberal camp, following the rest of the country as it moved to the right.

The paranoid right had its original boom in the 1950s, but by the late 1980s it was pretty much marginalized. Then came the Clinton era. The paranoid right was resurgent, with Mena and Vincent Foster and Waco and Oklahoma City fueling the fire. I suspect that's when Stadtmiller and Jones and a lot of the other RBN hosts began their shows. So they cut their teeth on anti-Clinton conspiracies.

But now the paranoid left is getting active again, and not surprisingly, they have colluded with the right-wingers over 9-11. But inevitably there are tensions between the two groups. We should expect more of the same between the various factions of the 9-11 Denial movement.

They both hate "the government" but they both expect it to do everything for them. The paranoid right types tend to be economic populists (much like the Nazis) and they demand the state "seal the borders" from foreign immigrants and products supposedly to protect the livelihoods of white Christian Americans.

There is a bit of a difference though, in that we are not involved in some sort of religious crusade, we also aren't so paranoid that we are constantly accusing each other of being government agents. We may not agree with each other's politics, but we leave it at that.

Was anyone else reminded of professional wrestling at the start of that audio segment? It's too bad that they don't disagree as vehemently with each other on issues such as who's behind the 9/11 attacks, what hit the buildings, their motivations, etc.

Conspiracy Smasher, not to mention that we root for different football teams. Of course, I realize that alliances formed here are ad hoc, at least in certain instances. For example, I won't be collaborating with Perry Logan politics anytime soon. The difference is that I can feel free to link to him over here because we are in synch on this issue, and I don't mind his rants about Republicans as long as he keeps ranting about Alex Jones and Dylan Avery.